Category: LETTERS Page 63 of 274

To Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. May 28, 1950

After several days’ browsing [through Atoms of Thought]—I must now have read almost all the text as well as your Introduction and Foreword—I have come to the conclusion that your patience in gathering “texts” must be a sub-conscious heritage from some Puritan ancestor of yours who picked “texts” from the Bible in order to quote them against the minister’s sermons. Your interest was not at all to choose beautiful passages or passages that contained the key to my philosophy or to my idiosyncrasies. I was out of the picture, just as the real history and doctrines of the Jews and the Christians was out of the picture for your text-collecting ancestor. You both already had your complete philosophy apart from anyone else’s books: but texts might be pungent; and when they tallied with your views, they might be employed to assert them boldly under another’s masque, for greater apparent modesty. So you have collected all the anticlerical texts in my books, no matter in what context, satirical or historical or even dramatic, whether it be Zeus or Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Hermes or Aphrodite that says them: my cynical father’s saying, or my own, if cynical in the right direction, will do for texts as well as the soft sentiments of a rich Polish-Jewish jeweller; and what I have said expressly to you and in print about myself that I am not and never wished or meant to be an American, is flatly contradicted. And when you say that I suggested the danger of spoiling a dictum if shorn too closely of its context, you forget to say or remember the danger I felt of being quoted only on the Left side; and you do not seem to feel that what you do quote about the pity that Bertrand Russell should waste his powers in repeating anticlerical commonplaces (although he did it only for pot-boilers) you do not feel that it is a pity that you should make me do the same thing in this book gratuitously. When I wrote The Life of Reason criticism of all non-naturalistic philosophy and religion was inevitable; and I did it and do it to bring out, if I can, the beauty of naturalism, not to insult the beliefs of other people. The cream of those beliefs, pagan, Indian, and Catholic especially, are just the baroque ornaments with which I like to adorn, and to vivify, my opinions; because Positivism without “post-rational” detachment is deadly and hypocritical. My anti-religious side is only a part of my pessimism; those myths are materially false, and a philosopher should not flirt with them; but they are the tragedy—Hebraic and Christian as well as Greek—of human illusions and vanity. Tragedy, the tragedy of existence, should be transcended, but it cannot be decently mocked.

I wanted to tell you frankly what I feel on this subject: but I do not regret that you should have taken the pains to make this collection. It is not a fair representation of my philosophy; but it is a fair record of one strain in it, and if it stimulates or entertains the public, so much the better. It would be unreasonable to expect the public to read us if we wrote only long books that bore them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Oxford, England. May 27, 1887.

Dear Harry,

A word today to tell you that you have put a very fanciful and astonishing meaning on my “fall from grace”. I didn’t discover it from your own enigmatical references to it, but this morning comes a letter from the good and outspoken Herbert which announces that I have been batting with Russell. If you choose to believe it, I am perfectly willing and shouldn’t mind your knowing it if it were true—for I shouldn’t be in the least ashamed of it. But it doesn’t happen to be true. If you reread my letter you will see that what I had in mind was what I had already written to Herbert Lyman about—namely my running after Russell in a senseless and absurd fashion. Now don’t put an ignoble and unworthy interpretation on this also, or I shall think that you are blind to everything that enters into my life. “My running after Russell” means “my thoughts running after him”; so, after believing that I have been bumming with him, don’t imagine that I have been sniping him. He has taken me up because he has chosen to do so, and after his fashion has been overwhelmingly kind. But the trouble, from my point of view, what I call my “fall from grace and self-control” (I think I said self-control also) is simply this. Russell has a way of treating people which is insufferably insolent and insulting. Never for a moment did I imagine I could allow anyone to treat me in such a way. But I find that instead of caring for my own dignity and independence—instead of subordinating to my interest in myself and to my ways of doing things, all other interests and ways of doing things—instead of this old habit of mine, I find that I don’t care a rap for my interest in myself or my ways of doing things, but that I am quite willing to stand anything, however outrageous, that comes from a certain quarter. This is what has happened to me. I am a fool to say a word about it—especially when people think that I am talking about trifles. Is it actually possible that you believe me capable of making a fuss and feeling unhappy because I had been off on a bat? You insist on not believing what I say when I tell you that such things are of absolutely no importance or interest for me, except as they may affect health and get a man into trouble. When I write about gay things I will write gaily—when I write in this serious fashion don’t imagine I am referring to “country matters”.

Sincerely G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. May 26, 1940

Dear Mrs. Potter

You don’t know how much I am touched by your constancy in thinking of me in these troubled times, and wishing to let me take refuge in a safe place. But I am afraid that, morally and perhaps even materially, you are suffering more from the war in America than I suffer in Italy. We have three meatless days a week, but “meat” does not include ham, tongue, bacon, sweetbreads, brains, liver, or sausage, so that there is no lack of animal substance provided for us; and coal is going to be rationed next winter, but I shall have a sitting-room with a fire-place where I can burn wood, if the central heating proves insufficient. The summer I expect to spend at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, as far as possible from any military front; and in the winter, as I have no settled abode, I shall see what the circumstances are, and choose my lodgings accordingly. And although it is announced that Italy may come at any moment into the war, people seem perfectly calm and cheerful; and my own state of mind is infinitely calmer than it was during the other war, when I was in England, and so distressed that I couldn’t work—at least in the last two years—but only read Dickens and walked in the country, having bread and cheese and a pint of “bitter” in some country inn for luncheon—there was nothing else to be had—and writing melancholy soliloquies in a small notebook. Now I can go on with my regular occupations undisturbed, and don’t expect to hear any bombs dropping, as I did in London during the first Zeppelin raid. All this is horribly casual and egotistical: yet if I went to America I should be distracted by the hysterical excitement which seems to prevail there, and my work— for I actually have prescribed work to do for a book of joint authorship to be published in America—would be interrupted and embittered. The only danger for me is that the U.S. should come in and I shouldn’t be able to get any money: but there are ways of circumventing even that difficulty, if it arises. My Spanish friends also urge me to join them; but there too I should be terribly disturbed, and the journey alone would seriously upset me. So don’t worry about me, dear Mrs. Potter, but hope for the early return of peace.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons New York.
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts.  May 25, 1904

Gentlemen:

I am sending you a first installment of my magnum opus “The Life of Reason”. There are four more Books, which will follow in a few weeks if you are favourably disposed towards the idea of publishing them. I send this part ahead, as I am anxious to have all arrangements for publication made before I leave this country, as I am to be away for fifteen months.

This book is not like my former ones, a mere incidental performance. It practically represents all I have to say of any consequence, so that I feel a special interest in having it done in a way that shall express its own character and suggest the spirit in which I would have it read. My ideas may seem to you wrong, and of course I shall not insist on them if they prove to be really unreasonable; but if objections to them rest only on financial considerations, I should be inclined to run the risk and insure you against loss in any way that seems to you suitable, provided the liability is not beyond my means.

What I desire is chiefly this: that the five books be bound separately, making five small volumes, so that they may be easily held and carried about, and may also, at least eventually, be sold separately as well as in sets. The remaining parts are on Society, Religion, Art, and Science respectively, and might well be independent books. A system runs through them all, but there is no formal continuity; or only such as might well exist between three plays in a trilogy. The page might well be like that in the “Sense of Beauty” (better than in the Interpretations) or even smaller and more closely set: I don’t think large print really attractive: I hate a sprawling page. A compact page with a rather generous margin would be my ideal; and in this margin might be the running summary I have provided. This might also be instead, if you thought it better, at the upper corner of each page, or in an indentation (as in the Sense of Beauty). But in whatever form it appears it is a very important feature, because it is meant not merely to help the eye and carry along the thought over the details, but often to be a commentary as well as a summary and throw a side light on the subject.

The binding might be in more than one form: I should be glad to have the book as cheap as possible so that students might buy it. Why are hardly any books sold in paper covers in this country? Boards surely are a respectable garment, and seem to suggest that the body is more than the raiment. I confess, however, that I don’t know what difference in price would be involved in different sorts of binding, and I should be much interested if you would tell me.

Proof would have to be sent to me abroad; but there is no need of sending the MS with it, and the delay, once the operation has begun, is insignificant.

I shall probably not sail until the middle of July and shall be once or twice in New York in the interval, when I could easily call upon you.

Yours very truly G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. May 24, 1918

Dear Smith

Trivia is hardly a book to be read consecutively and only once: nevertheless I have done so, and I need hardly say with the greatest pleasure. It is not only the style and tone, so familiar and at the same time so exquisite, that delights me, for you know I can’t very well separate style from thought: it seems to me that the form in which a thought is cast is a part of its quality, and that the quality of the idea itself is only a deeper sort of form or style of expression: it too, like verbal form, expresses a reaction of the mind and its habits upon objects, rather the objects themselves; for ideas are not objects at all, but only views of objects. In your manner, therefore, I find and relish your way of thinking. Where did your get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue. And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. But I am afraid you don’t quite think so, are not quite reconciled to yourself and the world as you find them, and feel that it is ignominious to grow old and slant your umbrella against the wind. Now, if what is our inevitable fate is ignominious, I understand what Bridges says of Trivia, that it is the most immoral book ever written, although every word of it can be read aloud. But I don’t think so: it is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental. Yet the devil of it that, if in being that you don’t suggest or keep in reserve a firm background, a religion or philosophy that enables you to face and to judge all these small delights, and say to them [I enjoy] then the thing becomes ultimate and complete for you against your will. That is the danger and the trouble with Trivia: you must have a philosophy, even in fooling, or the fooling will be spoiled and made bitter by having to take the place of the philosophy that is wanting: and the sweet treble will crack. What I wish you would do is to write another Trivia, or two more (since Trivia had three faces) and make your bow to Luna and Hecate also, after having shown us Diana tripping across the flickering glades. Humility is not weak, it is just. Heraclitus said that justice presided over the flux, because such things didn’t deserve to last for ever.

You see I take Trivia very seriously, and I hope you will think it a compliment, and not mere ponderosity on my part.

Yours

G. S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.